At the Solstice, please expect heat
In the bus, please stay in your seat
We can’t leave the border
Till all is in order
Then the trip through customs is fleet.
Synopsis: I’m a Family Practitioner from Sioux City, Iowa. In 2010 I danced back from the brink of burnout, and, honoring a 1-year non-compete clause, traveled and worked in out-of-the-way places in Alaska, Nebraska, Iowa, and New Zealand. After 3 Community Health years, I took temporary gigs in Iowa, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Canada, and Alaska. Since the pandemic, I worked telemedicine, a COVID-19 clinic, a VA clinic, and spots Texas, Iowa, and Pennsylvania. Taking vacation from circuit-riding rural clinics in Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota, I went on vacation to Israel, and found myself in war zone. Israel closed its airspace. Grey Bull Rescues orchestrated our evacuation.
I’m Jewish. I will not be writing about religion or politics. See my post https://walkaboutdoc.wordpress.com/2010/09/13/why-i-dont-write-about-religion-politics-or-sex/
When the last of the suburbs and Bedouin camps had passed the window, the road steadily descended. I looked at the rocks with my penchant for amateur geology, reading the story of unimaginable forces twisting miles of rock, epics of volcanoes and floods and mass extinctions. We got to the desert floor, where the stripping-away of the limestone leaves the naked volcano footprints , bleaching under the sun, down to the Jordan valley, an extension of Africa’s Great Rift.
Grey Bull Rescues coordinated the tangled mass of logistics inherent in moving hundreds of people across borders and oceans. Israeli passport control uses amazing, automated machinery with facial recognition software. We tucked our pink-slip exit visas into unstamped passports
We waited in line in narrow shade next to the building. Parents fanned tiny babies, and I worried for them in the heat. When I smelled cigarette smoke, I looked to the upwind end of the line.
A man in his 20s spoke on his cell phone and puffed. I left our group to confront him. I pointed at his cigarette and in Hebrew I said please. He offered me one. I shook my head and pantomimed a baby, pointing downwind. He smiled and nodded, crushed out his smoke, and never stopped talking.
I returned to my group and we boarded the bus while the sun beat down from that highest of angles that comes only with the summer solstice. The air conditioning helped, adequately on the shady side. The Grey Bull volunteer (ex-military) warned us not to get off the bus until told to do so. And we listened. Even when the impatient bus driver opened the doors to raise the temperature, trying to drive us out of the bus.
I worried for the babies in the heat, and so did their parents.
We waited hours at the Jordan side of the crossing. The heat of the day rose and we sweltered and we finally went into the passport control building, the space overwhelmed by the mass of humanity trying to get out of the missile target zone, the aging AC doing its marginal best but also overwhelmed by the crowd’s body heat.
The sun had started its long slow descent when the Jordanians issued a single visa number to the 350 of us.
One by one we came through 4 lines to the passport counter, exquisite black marble with exquisite red granite trim. The uniformed supervisor stood and smoked under the 3-language NO SMOKING sign with the universal cigarette in the red-slashed circle. The facial-recognition cameras appeared to be prior generations. From the passport building to Customs we had a lot of baggage handlers with no identification trying to take our bags from us. I had to grab my bag handle from one of them.
I shouldn’t have been worried. Muslim courts traditionally have been hard on thieves. The guys were just trying for a tip.
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